On the one hand, yipee. On the other, even with some bonus tracks, this is a new meaning of the word 'Complete'. There is very little overlap with the Hat-Trick 4CD set, for example.
One reason for this is that 'Complete (sic)' has the stereo recording of the Hat show, made on the last night of its run, rather than the mono one, in the first few months. This means we lose at least one joke and one song I have heard since being a child.
The Another Hat recording is also problematic in that it has various audio faults: not the noise of them shuffling themselves and Donald's music around, but actual glitches in the sound. When I first heard it, I thought the disc was faulty. I tried extracting the data via cdparanoia with error correction turned to 11, same problems. I found a copy of one track where it's most noticeable from 'elsewhere', same problems.
Looking at it with an audio editor, the issues are visible and easily cured (a low pass filter does the trick for most of them) so why wasn't this done by EMI prior to re-releasing the material?
This entry was originally posted at http://lovingboth.dreamwidth.org/503553.html, because despite having a permanent account, I have had enough of LJ's current owners trying to be evil. Please comment there using OpenID -
